Thursday, September 7, 2017

"David Kassan: Painting a Link to the Past" by Christine Egnoski

Louise
and Lazar Farkas, Oil
on Panel, 46" x 42"

You could
feel the level of excitement and anticipation at the 19th annual The Art of the Portrait awards ceremony
as David Kassan's name was announced as the winner of the Draper Grand
Prize.David was welcomed to the stage
with a standing ovation.Selected from over
2,100 entries, David's painting titled Love
and Resilience is a portrait of Louise and Lazar Farkas and inspired by
their story of love and survival.It is
the latest in a series of paintings of Shoah Survivors that has changed the
course of how David thinks about life and his art.

Upon accepting
the award, David said, "Thank you so much Portrait Society of
America...This was definitely a dream for me, and I share these awards with the
Survivors, whom have all shared their sometimes painful, but mostly glorious
and inspiring lives with me."

Louise's
story began in Northern Romania, where her parents led a comfortable middle
class life producing dairy products and running a store. Lazar spent his youth across the border in
Czechoslovakia where he attended business school and then worked in a wholesale
grocery business. For a while, the borders between Romania and Czechoslovakia
were open, and Lazar would cross over to socialize, talking over coffee and
walking the sidewalks with a group of young women, one of whom was Louise.

As
anti-Semitism in German-occupied countries grew, Lazar was pressed into forced
labor. Working from early morning to late night, he helped build bunkers.
Louise was about 20 when she was deported to Auschwitz: “A woman that was in
power at the time liked my shoes,” says Louise, “and she took them and I had no
shoes. I was barefoot. It was cold...we struggled.” Louise lost her parents and
three of her siblings. But the tides were turning against Germany and security
was unraveling. “We walked out of the camp. Just simply,” says Louise of her
and her sister’s escape. “We had no place to go and no money and no food. We
went from country to country from there."

Lazar also
managed to run away from his forced labor. “I wound up somewhere in Poland, I
don’t know where," he says. He eventually volunteered with the Czechoslovakian
army and ended up stationed in his hometown. He learned that people were
escaping from the camps and wanted to look for Louise. Eventually, after several times of just
missing each other, Lazar found Louise and the two were soon married. Lazar's uncle was able to arrange for their
immigration to the United States and they settled in Brooklyn where Lazar got a
job in the grocery business.

Love and Resilience is one of several paintings
David has completed of Shoah survivors. He
is calling the project the EDUT (Hebrew for testimony) Project: Living
Witnesses, Survivors of the Holocaust. His first portrait of Auschwitz survivor
Sam Goldofsky was selelected from over 2,500 entries to be part of the BP
Portrait Award 2015 held annual at the National Portrait Gallery, London. A portrait of sisters Bella Sztul and Roslyn
Goldofsky, whose mother hid them from the Nazis with the help of Catholic families,
was also completed last year. David says, "With the paintings I've
completed so far of the Survivors, I feel that I have a responsibility to not
only represent them in the most authentic possible way, but also to document a
deeper understanding of their lives and not just the horrors of what they
witnessed early in their lives. My goal is to capture their resilience
throughout their lives. This goal is a tall order for a painter."

Meeting
with Survivors of Auschwitz at the Museum of Tolerance. Photo by Andy Romanoff

Always trying to improve and challenge himself with paintings that
are of increasing complexity and importance, earlier this year David traveled
with videographer Chloe Lee from New York City to Los Angeles to meet with
eleven Survivors of Auschwitz. His idea was to take his current series of
paintings to the next level, so he is now working on a life-sized
representation of all eleven Survivors.
The finished painting, which will take approximately two years to
complete, will be 18 feet long and 8 feet high and consist of 5 panels put together,
a work that David hopes will be, "so large that it can't be ignored." David explains, "Chloe and I have been
filming interviews with all of the Survivors in the series in order to document
their lives and inspiring words. We are also going to film each step of the
process in the creation of this large painting in order to educate about the
artistic journey as well as the journeys of the Survivors." He is
documenting the entire process on patreon.com/davidkassan.

Setting aside his gallery and commission work, David has dedicated
himself exclusively to the project.
Plans are in place in the Spring of 2019 for an opening, exhibition and
catalog featuring the large work and drawing studies, as well as the film, at
the Fischer Museum of Art. David's
commitment to the project runs deep; he says, "These paintings represent
the perseverance and the strength of the human spirit. I endeavor to respect
and show the dignity of each survivor and tell his or her story."

Digital
painting thumbnail for composition purposes. [painted in ArtRage on the iPad Pro]

David sees his role as a conduit: to listen with my painting and
to document it in an intensely intimate way. He feels there are three
components to each painting -- the artist, the subject, and the viewer -- and
he does not want his 'painting ego' to get in the way of the viewer and the
Survivor. Each aspect of his work is in service to the accurate and honest
representation of the Survivor.

Work in
progress for one of the five

panels for the large painting

David also has a very personal connection to the
project. In 1917, a young Murray Kassan immigrated to the United States,
escaping ethnic cleansing on the border of the Ukraine and Romania by the
Cossacks. Murray was David's grandfather, and his story of survival is a vague
unfocused legend in his family for many reasons. When his father was fifteen
years old, Murray was estranged from the family and his father never saw him
again. He passed away when David was very little and he never got to meet him. His
grandfather's story of survival is now only fragmented memories for David. "Painting
for me is also my way of understanding the world around me, my way of
connecting, and my excuse to interact and learn. In this project, it’s my
personal way of connecting to my grandfather’s lost story. With every
survivor’s story that I hear and record into a painting, I feel that I move
closer to the connection with my grandfather that I never had. My brush paints
a link between us."

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